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| James Boswell |
This day in 1740 is born James Boswell, in Edinburgh, Scotland, one of the greatest biographers ever.
The son of of advocate (later judge) Alexander Boswell and Euphemia, née Erskine, he enters the University of Edinburgh at 13, and doesn't like it. He escapes to London but is found and brought home.
His father has him instead tutored in law at home, and he graduates at 18. His fellow students include John Johnston and William Temple, who become lifelong friends.
Boswell moves to London. He loves to drink, travel and gossip. He meets the famous Samuel Johnson for the first time in Thomas Davies' bookshop near Covent Garden, London.
Johnson is known to be writing
A Dictionary of the English Languages, which
would be published when Boswell was 25.
Boswell studies law at Utrecht for a year, and proceeds to a two-year Grand Tour of Europe, visiting German courts and Italian cities and Corsica, meeting Rousseau, Voltaire and Corsica's rebel Pasquale Paoli, who is leading a revolt against Genoa.
Boswell develops a lifetime taste for talking with European leaders of the day and writing down what they say.
Timeline by Age in Years
26–He completes his legal education with the dissertation
Disputatio juridica de supellectile legata quam publicae disquisitioni. Two years later he writes
An Account of Corsica, a widely admired book, translated into four languages.
29–He marries the daughter of his father's sister, Margaret Montgomerie.
35–He publishes
The Journal of a Tour to the Western Isles of Scotland, an edited version of the journal he wrote during his journey through Scotland with Dr. Johnson two years before. During the next ten years he writes dozens of articles for London magazines.
42–His father, Lord Auchinleck, dies. Boswell becomes the 9th Laird of Auchinleck, a place where his family lived for two centuries.
44–Johnson dies.
48–Boswell is elected Recorder of Carlisle. He resigns the position after two years and moves to London.
49–Boswell's wife Margaret dies while her husband is on his way home from London.
51–He publishes the first of three volumes of a biography of Johnson, which has absorbed him for many years. The books are based on Boswell's own diaries (Boswell says - "A page of my Journal is like a cake of portable soup. A little may be diffused into a considerable portion."), which were lost until the 1920s. His detailed journals for three decades from the early 1760s by themselves provide unique first-hand observations of life and personalities of his time and ensure continued interest in him. The biography goes beyond Plutarch's
Lives, which were personal, and provides intensely personal stories and arresting descriptions of contemporary life.
55–He dies in his house on Gt. Portland Street in London, following weeks of serious illness, having not yet finished the third and final volume of his book.
See also
Robert Caro.
